| A MUSLIM MISSIONARY
GROUP DRAWS NEW SECURITY IN U.S. |
By SUSAN SACHS |
One of Al Qaeda‘s first assignments for
Iyman Faris, the Ohio truck driver named last month in a terrorist
plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, was to visit a travel agency
while he was in Pakistan in late 2001 to have some old airline tickets
reissued, federal investigators say.
Because the tickets were not in his name, Mr. Faris needed an explanation
to validate his request. Investigators say he used one that other
Qaeda recruits have relied on to disguise their intentions: he pretended
to be a member of Tablighi Jamaat, a fraternity of traveling Muslim
preachers that is well known in Pakistan and other Muslim countries.
Founded in rural India 75 years ago, Tablighi Jamaat is one of the
most widespread and conservative Islamic movements in the world.
It describes itself as a nonpolitical, and nonviolent, group interested
in nothing more than proselytizing and bringing wayward Muslims back
to Islam.
But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Tablighi Jamaat, once little
known outside Muslim countries, has increasingly attracted the interest
of federal investigators, cropping up on the margins of at least
four high-profile terrorism cases.
It has been cited either as part of a cover story like Mr. Faris‘s,
or as a springboard into militancy, as in the case of John Walker
Lindh, the American serving time for aiding the Taliban.
Law enforcement officials say the group has been caught up in such
cases because of its global reach and reputation for rejecting such
worldly activities as politics, precisely the qualities that are
exploited by terror groups like Al Qaeda.
The name Tablighi Jamaat is Arabic for the "group that propagates
the faith," and its members visit mosques and college campuses
in small missionary bands, preaching a return to purist Islamic values
and recruiting other Muslim men — often young men searching
for identity — to join them for a few days or weeks on the
road.
"We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat
in the United States, and we have found that Al Qaeda used them for
recruiting, now and in the past," said Michael J. Heimbach,
the deputy chief of the F.B.I.‘s international terrorism section.
Another senior law enforcement official described the group as "a
natural entree, a way of gathering people together with a common
interest in Islam."
The official added, "Then extremists use that as an assessment
tool to evaluate individuals with particular zealousness and interest
in going beyond what‘s offered."
Neither the organization nor Tabligh activists have been accused
of committing any crime or of supporting terrorism. Yet the authorities
remain alert to what they see as the group‘s susceptibility
to infiltration and manipulation.
To Tabligh leaders, accustomed to operating in relative obscurity,
the new scrutiny is unwanted, and the government‘s contention
that the group has served as a recruiting ground for terrorists is
grossly unfair.
In interviews over the past several months, they said their beliefs
were antithetical to everything espoused by Osama bin Laden and Al
Qaeda.
A Renunciation of Politics
"It‘s a very great accusation,
a total lie," said Abdul Rahman Khan, a leader of the group‘s
North American leadership council. "Anybody who has been active
in our work, who spends at least three days, will have an understanding
of our peaceful nature."
Mr. Khan, who lives near New Orleans and has been involved with the
group for 36 years, said the Tablighi Jamaat‘s refusal to discuss
politics meant that people with militant views quickly moved on.
"From our experience, those people who have those intentions
don‘t talk around us," he said. "If someone starts
even one word, we cut him off. So he‘s going to go somewhere
where he can get an audience."
Indeed, the number of core activists is quite small, and they do
little to blend in. A gathering of American and Canadian Tablighi
Jamaat missionaries this year drew about 200 people. It was at Al
Falah mosque in Corona, Queens, a Tabligh center whose neighbors
have grown accustomed to the sight of bearded men wearing robes and
leather booties that are meant to replicate the dress of Islam‘s
prophet, Muhammad.
Younger disciples who were not emirs, or leaders, of a region or
city, remained outside, using the time to proselytize for Islam in
the mostly Mexican immigrant neighborhood. Inside, their elders mulled
the question of whether they should be held responsible for the actions
of people who take part in Tabligh missions but are not dedicated
to its beliefs.
"We don‘t prevent anyone from coming,
but obviously we don‘t know the nature of the individual who
is coming and we don‘t check," Mr. Khan said. "There‘s
no way we can."
The Tablighi Jamaat is less a formal organization than a network
of part-time preachers. Begun as a response to a surge of Hindu proselytizing
during the waning days of British rule in India, the Tablighi Jamaat
now has bases and schools in Pakistan, Britain and Canada. Its annual
gatherings in India and Pakistan draw hundreds of thousands.
Traveling and Proselytizing
Generally, though, Tabligh missions are small — a few heavily
bearded men, carrying sleeping bags and cooking stoves who show up
at a mosque, give lectures and go door to door calling Muslims to
prayer.
A central purpose of their visits is to ask other men to travel and
preach with them for a time, which they say can benefit the preachers
even more than their audiences.
"It‘s kind of a rite
of passage for practicing young Muslims," said Mairaj Syed,
a law student at U.C.L.A. who says he was briefly involved with the
Tablighi Jamaat in high school in Arizona.
"They emphasized
identity, showing outwardly that you are a Muslim," Mr. Syed
said. "Also, there was the element of going out, visiting cities,
sleeping in mosques. I thought it was cool."
They preach a return to the teachings and trappings of Islam‘s
seventh-century founders, including segregation of women and rejection
of activities like voting that they say distract Muslims from the
worthier task of preparing for judgment day.
Their goals, the group‘s American leaders say, are devotion
to God and promoting change in each individual, not society.
"What we‘re trying to do is unite the hearts of all people,
and politics has a propensity to divide," said Walid-Muhammad
Scott, a Philadelphia activist who is a member of the leadership
council. "That‘s why we don‘t talk about it at all."
But law enforcement officials and moderate Muslim scholars say that
disengagement from society is what worries them most about the Tablighi
Jamaat.
"You teach people to exclude themselves, that they
don‘t fit in, that the modern world is an aberration, an offense,
some form of blasphemy," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor
of Islamic law at U.C.L.A. "By preparing people in this fashion,
you are preparing them to be in a state of warfare against this world."
Ripe for Exploitation?
Professor El Fadl said he spoke from experience, having briefly joined
the group as a teenager in Cairo about 20 years ago. "I don‘t
believe there‘s a sinister plot where they‘re in bed
with Osama bin Laden but are hiding it," Professor El Fadl said.
"But I think that militants exploit the alienated and withdrawn
social attitude created by the Tablighis by fishing in the Tablighi
pond."
Some Muslim groups have long criticized the Tablighi Jamaat for its
official refusal to take a stand on the causes that have inflamed
the Muslim world, from the Afghan holy war against the Soviet Union
in the 1980‘s to the more recent wars over Kashmir, Chechnya
and Bosnia.
But investigators in America and elsewhere say more violent groups
have been well served by the Tablighi Jamaat‘s apolitical stance
and ability to move missionaries around countries and across borders.
"There may be groups that do not actually profess its basic
ideology and profound religiosity and yet use the cover of the Tablighi
Jamaat in order to evade scrutiny of the security forces, knowing
full well that the Jamaat would not take a public stance against
any defectors," the Canadian intelligence service said in a
recent analysis.
A turning point for the movement came in the 1990‘s, with the
emergence of the purist Islamic rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
according to former members and intelligence officials.
By way of illustration, Farad Esack, a South African Islamic scholar
who says he spent 12 years with the group in Pakistan, recounted
a favorite Tablighi Jamaat analogy that equates individual Muslims
to the electricians who work to light up a village. Each person lays
wire until one day, the mayor comes to switch on the lights.
"For many people in Tablighi Jamaat," he said, "the
Taliban represented God switching the lights on."
Some people drawn to the Tablighi Jamaat were also drawn to the Taliban,
Mr. Esack said. The Tablighi Jamaat, he said, "attracts angry
people — people who need absolutes, who can‘t stand the
grayness of life." In turn, that mentality "lends itself
to being recruited by a Taliban-type project."
John Walker Lindh‘s path to militancy began in California,
where he met Tabligh missionaries in 1999 after converting to Islam.
He joined them on a proselytizing tour but soon left them behind.
"John‘s experience of the Tablighi is that they are
what they say they are," said George Harris, one of Mr. Lindh‘s
lawyers. "They are apolitical. And he found that an extreme
position that he didn‘t find particularly attractive. He wanted
guidance as to political and spiritual issues."
Mr. Lindh‘s experience, however, did play a role in his odyssey
toward Afghanistan.
One year after his Tablighi Jamaat mission, casting about for a place
to study Islam, Mr. Lindh contacted one of his visiting Tabligh preachers,
who enrolled him in a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan.
It was there, Mr. Lindh has said, that he became convinced that he
should help the Taliban. He then signed up for a military training
camp that ultimately sent him to fight American and Northern Alliance
forces in Afghanistan. He was captured there and is now serving 20
years in federal prison, having pleaded guilty to charges of aiding
the Taliban and carrying explosives.
Federal prosecutors have suggested that the Tablighi Jamaat was also
seen as a springboard by at least one of the defendants in a Portland,
Ore., terrorism case, in which six men and one woman are accused
of plotting to fight with the Taliban and Al Qaeda against American
forces.
The men tried to get to Afghanistan in the late fall of 2001, according
to the indictment. Most came home after spending some time in China,
but one defendant, Jeffrey Leon Battle, went on to Bangladesh.
Prosecutors said Mr. Battle‘s trip there was aimed at finding
Tablighi Jamaat members who might help him get military training
and join the Taliban. His trial and that of the other Portland defendants
is scheduled for early January.
Six Yemeni-American men from Lackawanna, a Buffalo suburb, apparently
told family and friends a similar story — that they were going
to Pakistan in the spring of 2001 for religious training with the
Tablighi Jamaat. But once in Pakistan, the men went on to take military
training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, investigators say.
The six have pleaded guilty to providing material support to Al Qaeda,
or otherwise aiding a terrorist organization through their attendance
at the camp.
Federal investigators said the young men, before their trip, had
been instructed by a recruiter from Al Qaeda to feign an interest
in Tablighi Jamaat to build a believable excuse for traveling to
Pakistan for their supposed religious course, rather than to an Arab
country where some of them would at least have spoken the language.
In the case of Mr. Faris, who has pleaded guilty to charges of providing
support for Al Qaeda, court documents did not say whether it was
he or his Qaeda handlers who had the idea of using Tablighi Jamaat
as a cover to organize a trip to Yemen without arousing suspicion.
Elders and Acolytes
Al Falah mosque is the main Tablighi Jamaat outpost on the East Coast
and often serves as a meeting place for activists from the group‘s
11 regional zones and 37 local areas. They come from as far away
as Canada, California and Florida to the plain-fronted mosque, almost
lost on a busy street dominated by Mexican restaurants, a Buddhist
temple and a Jehovah‘s Witness hall.
During the national gathering earlier this year, the wives of some
of the members met in an apartment near the mosque. They sat cross-legged
in one small room while a Tabligh elder, refusing to sit in the same
room with women, shouted a lecture to them from behind a closed door.
Meanwhile, three Tabligh acolytes huddled over coffee in a Mexican
restaurant across the street.
As a man from Cleveland tried to persuade the waitress to become
a Muslim, one of his companions, a 19-year-old from North Carolina,
talked excitedly of his own conversion just weeks before.
Sprouting a small reddish beard and dressed in a long tunic and loose
trousers, he said Tablighi Jamaat had rescued him from drugs. Now,
he said, his name is Ali Abdullah and his dream is to study Islam
in Pakistan.
"I want to be in a Muslim environment,"
he explained.
Was he also interested in political causes like Chechnya, Kashmir
or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
"Man, I know I‘d
kill anybody who killed another Muslim," he blurted, rapping
a quick drumbeat with his hand on the table.
His two companions glared at him. One kicked him sharply under the
table.
"We respect all people," said the man from
Cleveland, who gave his name as Abdulhakim. "Tablighi Jamaat
taught me that you don‘t need to protest, that we respect the
prophets of the Christians and Jews." |
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